Spring RTS Engine

Hi everyone.

I only found about SpringRTS a few days ago, I've looked briefly through the wiki and it seems almost too good to be true - a professional level RTS game engine that's open source!

I had two main queries...

1)Is the project still under active development or is it 'finished' at this point?
2)How active and helpful is the community... how many games are currently in development, etc?

My background is I'm a pretty experienced professional software developer. I used to work in the games industry but am now a contractor doing whatever anyone wants to pay me for :) In the past I started working on my own RTS game from scratch and had something that you could actually play, but then real life got in the way. I'm getting more tempted to start up again, as I still think my RTS ideas are good, but I'm wondering if something like Spring would be a better platform to build on top of, rather than resurrect my old project. Stuff like built-in multiplayer functionality just seems hard to turn down!

My area of interest is the classic top-down RTS, which I feel got neglected once fully-3D worlds became feasible - I think there's a lot of mileage here. So many times when playing games like Warcraft II, I didn't want to make a whole new game but just wished I could get my hands on the code and add in some seemingly obvious missing features.

Sorry for the long post, but I figured I should introduce myself rather than butt in with questions :)

d000hgRTS wrote:1)Is the project still under active development or is it 'finished' at this point?

you have only to check the repo and you will see that it is still being worked on.

d000hgRTS wrote:2)How active and helpful is the community... how many games are currently in development, etc?

Helpfulness is a relative measurement, we have an active archivist personality(8611, aka Knorke), and many resources within. Many projects share code and often if you have a question about some code a project uses you will find us at least willing to point you in the right direction. Activity, well, mileage may vary by project and is also relative.

d000hgRTS wrote:My area of interest is the classic top-down RTS, which I feel got neglected once fully-3D worlds became feasible - I think there's a lot of mileage here. So many times when playing games like Warcraft II, I didn't want to make a whole new game but just wished I could get my hands on the code and add in some seemingly obvious missing features.

then you have come to the right place.

d000hgRTS wrote:Sorry for the long post, but I figured I should introduce myself rather than butt in with questions :)

LOL, well we still don't know you or really the nature of your experience/expertise.

Either way, welcome, remember that all our projects are SDZ/SD7 which are just renamed zip/7z archives, so read away! There are many projects in various states, just remember while source is open, assets and identities can be touchy, people like to get a shout out if you use their stuff, even if the license is open and it never hurts to get in touch with the content developer who's stuff you want to use, you never know, we may just add it in your project for you.

Spring is mature but i'm not sure whether it's finished. Open Source projects tend to never get 'finished', there's always something else to add.

A lot here depends on what kind of a game you want. It's trivially easy to hack the camera to make it top-down and generate flat maps.

Harder things might be organic models (skeletal mesh deforms are *still* not supported), but if you're aiming for this type of retro look, the available forward-kinematic rigid animation system is probably sufficient.

There are several 'major' projects still in active developement: i'd name Zero-K and Evolution RTS as ones that come to mind foremost but there's also Spring 1944, and theoretically, BAR and maybe whatever smoth is doing these days.

There are a lot of games that were made and are basically only maintained now, i'd put Kernel Panic into those.

And some projects i can't even name happening somewhere below radar and eventually generating interesting screenshots.

The community, like many, has some trolls or well-intentioned but crazy people; however you should expect answers to your questions if you have them.

d000hgRTS wrote:Hi everyone.

Welcome!

d000hgRTS wrote: 1)Is the project still under active development or is it 'finished' at this point?

At this point, it's pretty mature, but it's still active and in no way finished. Example: https://github.com/spring/spring/commits/develop
Also, there's more to this project than just the engine. The in-game libraries, lobbies and server infrastructure are separate and also actively developed.

d000hgRTS wrote: 2)How active

Hard to say as not all community development is reported here, but here's a hint: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32888
We're active

d000hgRTS wrote: and helpful is the community...

This was always a bit controversial. You'll get your answers, although the they might not come with rose petals. (The moderator team does its best to keep things civil).

d000hgRTS wrote: how many games are currently in development, etc?

Zero-K (ZK) is the most active one now I think, and they even have their own forum.
Mature games can be found here: https://springrts.com/wiki/Games and roughly half of them are still actively developed. For some other examples, check viewforum.php?f=47

d000hgRTS wrote: My area of interest is the classic top-down RTS, which I feel got neglected once fully-3D worlds became feasible - I think there's a lot of mileage here. So many times when playing games like Warcraft II, I didn't want to make a whole new game but just wished I could get my hands on the code and add in some seemingly obvious missing features.

Sounds great. Don't hesitate to ask any questions.

This was always a bit controversial. You'll get your answers, although the they might not come with rose petals. (The moderator team does its best to keep things civil).

I've never come across a moderator team that would describe itself differently. I would say there are both helpful people and some quite immature people, but what community doesn't have those.

The community is as helpful as yourself, meaning that if you contribute...you likely get some help via the irc channels. There is active development, but all on hobby and a more personal basis. If you want something done... you inform yourself on the current implementations. And if absolutely necessary you could program something yourself with lua code (implemented as widget or gadget 'plugins').

Community won't take you by the hand, you gotta research a lot by yourself. But if you ask the right informed questions there's enough support availible.

I don't think the top-down rts is neglected much. Casual gaming just blew up more. Old rts games were more casual as well compared to today's possibilities.

I'd advice you to start playing one of the existing games a bit before starting on anything. You'll get to know the engine possibilities and some limitations better.

The next step could be contribute to some exisiting games in order toget to know the code behind mechanics. If your desired feature doesn't exist, you could write/modify something yourself for another game and use it later for your own.

welcome...

Thanks for the replies - to get multiple replies in a few hours is always a good indication about a community

I've been wading through the wiki but clearly a project like this is BIG. Is the wiki generally kept up to date, or should a noob trawl the forums as well?

For instance I noted it talks about Windows support being unofficial but only references VS2012, while VS has moved on quite a lot since then.

Is the community as a whole as linux-orientated as that suggests, out of interest? The replies so far feel like that's the case (not a complaint!) It helps me slip into the right mindset though.

Windows is fine if you are not working in the engine.

Spring projects largely use Lua outside of some older projects using an antiquated thing called bos..

It would be a good idea to at least give the forums a look through, look at the project sub forums with recent posts, look in art and modeling, mapping etc. It would be good to spectate a few BA games and a few ZK games. It would be a good idea to look at some of the more active projects that while not out demonstrate new tech, BAR, my project, Gajop's lua lobby and Scened

There is a lot of stuff, spring is a whole ecosystem of connected projects.

You probably know that spring is the engine and then there are many games to it. The engine runs on both linux and windows, and the macOS build is being under troubleshooting (it worked before).

The engine is built under linux because all our engine developers are linux people, and I think it's somehow easier to do it that way (at least that's what the wiki says). But I think it would be nice to have someone do it on windows too.

The actual playerbase has no linux preponderance. The game works fine in windows.

d000hgRTS wrote:I've been wading through the wiki but clearly a project like this is BIG. Is the wiki generally kept up to date, or should a noob trawl the forums as well?

Start with the wiki, although it would be best to keep up with the development in the forums too. In any case searching the forums before asking questions is usually a given.

d000hgRTS wrote:For instance I noted it talks about Windows support being unofficial but only references VS2012, while VS has moved on quite a lot since then.

Windows support is official, and it's possible to even build the engine on Windows without too much difficulty provided you do it with mingw instead of VS.
However, as a game dev you probably don't need to build the engine at all. Games are made in Lua and for that it's enough to use the engine builds provided here.
You can get the stable builds here: https://springrts.com/wiki/Download
Nightly (static) builds are also available for Windows and Linux and updated on each commit: http://springrts.com/dl/buildbot/defaul ... p/?C=M;O=D

d000hgRTS wrote: Is the community as a whole as linux-orientated as that suggests, out of interest? The replies so far feel like that's the case (not a complaint!) It helps me slip into the right mindset though.

A lot of people use Linux (most notably all core engine devs are Linux users), but at the same time there's a heavy Windows community present (ZK infrastructure for example is majorly written in C#).
Development on both platforms is possible. For games there's no difference where you develop, while for the engine it's probably slightly easier to setup everything on Linux, but for an experienced programmer there should be no major hurdle either way.
Map making used to be easier on Windows, but I'm not sure what's the status right now.

You can see plenty about how active we currently are on these forums and at https://github.com/spring and on the repos listed at https://springrts.com/wiki/Gamedev:PublicRepos, https://springrts.com/wiki/Lobby_Development.

Productive people are generally helpful to each other :)

If you are an experienced C++ developer I don't think you'll have a problem getting into Spring. The engine has existed for ~10 year now and is generally well developed, so most of 'big' features that are still wanting are things that are not easy to implement. Engine developers in general are linux orientated atm, but the playerbase/gamedevs/etc are spread across both windows & linux. There is nothing to stop you developing Spring on windows, but if you work on the engine it will be much easier to do it with mingw (+Code:Blocks/Eclipse) than with MSVC.

The wiki is basically kept up to date, except for pages that are marked as out of date. I imagine you'll care more about how easily readable the engine code is, which ofc depends as much on you as on the code.

Again, thanks for the excellent replies. I'd noticed from the wiki that there's a high emphasis on scripting, notably with Lua - which is great as it's one thing I hadn't gotten round to in my own RTS game project.

I was interested just how far that goes - can you totally change game mechanics without touching the core C++ code? For instance if we compared Red Alert and TA they are fundamentally quite different in some areas - is that within the scripting side of things or would you have to start hacking code?

Could anyone recommend two Spring-based games which are most different, so I can see for myself how far people have pushed things?

Well, since you asked: XTA is game which is very close to the original TA: https://springrts.com/wiki/XTA

Then there are games which are totally different: maybe http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed is a good example?

• Conflict terra has resource harvesting.
• my old project gundam RTS had both power and a custom resource system.
• kernel panic is very.. different.
• we even had a tower defense game years ago

here are some

d000hgRTS wrote:Thanks for the replies - to get multiple replies in a few hours is always a good indication about a community

I've been wading through the wiki but clearly a project like this is BIG. Is the wiki generally kept up to date, or should a noob trawl the forums as well?

For instance I noted it talks about Windows support being unofficial but only references VS2012, while VS has moved on quite a lot since then.

Is the community as a whole as linux-orientated as that suggests, out of interest? The replies so far feel like that's the case (not a complaint!) It helps me slip into the right mindset though.

I try to keep the wiki up to date wrt game dev every engine release, but I don't know all aspects e.g. Mapping (which enetheru and others ahve done a great job with). Building spring page is updated every so often for windows, but you don't need to be able to compile Spring to make a game with it. Certainly it is doable though, with gcc it is fairly straightforward, even. Engine devs are all linux based.

edit: And to toot my own horn, MechCommander Legacy is majorly different to most Spring games, even though it is still big stompy robots: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dnn5hzr4oz9t0 ... y.wmv?dl=0

Cool. Probably the only reservation I have/had is that while I loved TA, it's not the direction I want to go in with my own game so if Spring is very tightly molded around RTS==TA mechanics I would have to get into the code. I'm sure it would be worth it but it's good to know.

I'll have a look around some games - I've been looking for a new "classic RTS" to play anyway - and perhaps come back with a brief summary of what I'd like to do in my own game, to see how well/badly that would fit with SpringRTS.

It would really behoove you to look at existing projects. People will eventually lose patience answering questions that could be answered by looking at existing stuff. So before you post your idea thread, be sure to look at some of the projects to get a better understanding of the broad range of things possible.

Think of it as part of your feasibility study before you start on your design. Because if you don't at least take some time to look at what has been done to get an idea about how broad this engine is, your answers from us will be reduced to: "lua it."

I wouldn't say it's very tightly molded in TA mechanics: I mean, you can define own amount of resources, you can make harvesters like in Dune II, etc. There's a lot of things you can do, but of course some very creative solutions take more of own lua code.

Springrts was originally a 3D-remake of the TA-engine, but it has moved away considerably during these years, so it's no longer like that anymore.

Great.

The only other thing I would like to ask now is, what proportion of people on the general boards (not the engine-development ones) have ever worked on the engine code or even looked at how it works? Would it be fair to say most people just treat the engine as a black box and write scripts - or do they tend to look at the source and be knowledgeable on the architecture?

Anyway I look forward to playing some games (it's a tough life!)

Spring is pretty versatile, the list of games from smoth should give you a good idea of what it can do.

I guess many people on the general boards have not read much, if any, of the engine code. You can make games without reading it, and many do, since the wiki generally has good info and there are templates to start from.

But eventually if you get into making complicated stuff you'll likely want to dip into the engine code just to find out why stuff does what it does.